


Dusk

by WilliamLazenbyotch



Category: Horror of Dracula (1958)
Genre: Gen, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 17:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16371617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WilliamLazenbyotch/pseuds/WilliamLazenbyotch
Summary: Harker and Van Helsing meet one last time before the young man's ill-fated journey to Klausenburg, and the good doctor remembers an earlier brush with their adversary.





	Dusk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disgruntled_owl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/gifts).



They said their goodbyes in a land on the right side of the forest, Harker packing a last few essentials in his mentor's study in between sips of brandy and last minute questions.

"Strange to think the world has such monsters in it," he said thoughtfully, securing his copy of Gerard along the bottom of his portmanteau, pulling a shirt over top such that it might not clatter against the cloth-wrapped photograph that lay nearby. "I supposed that is what good men are called to counterbalance."

Van Helsing tapped his thin fingers along the edge of his phonograph case, brows furrowed. He did not comment.

"We'll meet again in Klausenburg, then?" Harker asked, "When it's over?"

The crackling of the early autumn fire underscored the long pause before the elder man spoke.

" _If_  it's over, old friend. If it's over."

The young archivist looked up, and seeing the worry evident in his companion's gaunt face, stopped attending to his belongings.

"I do wish you wouldn't speak so," he said. "It scarcely puts me in a frame of mind to be brave."

"You know I have every confidence in you."

"And yet...?" Harker began to inquire.

"And yet I know that when it comes to this contagion, things are seldom ever over."

Harker looked at Van Helsing, realizing that in the handful of years since he'd met the man, he had never learned any save the barest details of his personal history with the inquiry in which they were both involved.

"Tell me, you've mentioned that you and this... this Dracula have met before. Is there anything you haven't told me that I ought know?"

"You're familiar with the Scholomance?" Van Helsing asked pensively.

"Rumanian legend, if I'm not mistaken? Something about the devil having a confounded university down by Lake Hermanstadt, where the local necromancers take courses in riding dragons and summoning the wind?"

"I couldn't say," A warm but somehow sad smile lit across the older man's face. "It was Michaelmas break when last I was in Hermanstadt, and nobody seemed to be taking lessons."

Harker raised both his glass and an eyebrow.

"Nobody except me, I suppose..."

There was another pause as Harker waited for a story that never came, and the conversation decayed into silence. Van Helsing eventually turned his gaze towards the fire, its reflection dancing in his pale grey eyes in a way that made his expression all the more intense.

His companion finished his drink uneasily as he lost himself for a moment in recollections. _Darkness. The scent of decomposed blood. Wax-spatted altars and sconces, black with all the layering of centuries of crimes._ He had been a scholar too in those days, an academic dilettante wavering between the surgeon's theater, the courtroom, and the library. He had wanted to see something of the world.

What had he seen? It had been disconcerting to witness--to feel--that blackness moving against blackness as it had, as though a shadow had gained depth and stepped out of flatness to greet him. He had thought, back then, that one of his colleagues was playing tricks on him, and it was not until his gaze locked with that terrible, basilisk stare that his credulity finally faded wholly into terror. His strength had slackened to water, and although he loathed the lordly creature before him as he loathed hell itself, his only instinct as those deathly red eyes peered into him was to kneel.

"My apologies," Van Helsing said abruptly, blinking as he realized the awkward turn affairs had taken. "I fear I've just been needlessly cryptic. You've the transcript of all our most recent findings?"

"Yes. I should know everything you know, unless..."

"My dear Harker, you do. I assure you. Anything else I could offer you would be nothing more than memory, and as I'm fond of saying..."

"Knowledge is stronger than memory." Harker tapped his temple.

"Quite." Both men grinned.

Outside the wind picked up, sending a draft through a loose-paned window that set dried specimens of _allium_ blossom and hawthorn branch briefly a flutter in the glow of the dying sun.

"Well," Harker said resignedly, setting his tumbler down on the table as he checked his watch, "I should really be headed out. There's a concert at St. James, and I promised Lucy one last evening together."

Van Helsing reached out to clasp the young man's hand in his own.

"Take care. I have faith in you knowing what is at stake."

"Oh, I do," he replied. "This night most especially, I do."

They parted hands and ways as Harker turned to get his hat, and it was only as the door tipped shut that it occurred to Van Helsing that briefly, ever so briefly, the young man's fingers had seemed to trace a scar on his wrist, gliding over the points where an onlooker might think it seemed the skin had once been torn by something akin to two dragging nails. He rubbed the old wound instinctively, thinking how narrowly the injury had missed the radial artery.

Night fell, and he left his drink unfinished, letting the glass catch and refract the last rays of dim red light before they were extinguished.


End file.
